The one at Ballinrea in County Cork survives as a spread of burnt material in a reclaimed field, the kind of detail that would barely register to a passing eye, yet it points to activity stretching back potentially thousands of years.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is generally understood to have functioned as an ancient cooking or processing site. The typical method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. The stones, cracked and shattered by repeated heating and cooling, were then raked aside, and over time those discarded fragments accumulated into the distinctive horseshoe-shaped mound that archaeologists recognise today. Most examples in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, though some sites were used across multiple periods. At Ballinrea, the monument sits on level ground on the southern side of a stream, a location entirely consistent with how these sites were chosen: proximity to a reliable water source was essential to the whole process. The reclaimed agricultural land it now occupies has obscured much of the original form, leaving that spread of burnt, fire-cracked stone as the principal indicator of what once took place here.